Brown

Prince Albert died at Windsor on the fourteenth of December 1861. Queen Victoria, forty-two years old, withdrew from public life and spent the next forty years a widow in mourning. From the autumn of 1864 the man who, more than any other, brought her out of the deepest of her seclusion was a Highland gillie of the Balmoral estate, John Brown of Crathie, son of a small farmer of Crathienaird, brought south by the household to be the queen's outdoor servant. He stayed in her service until his death in 1883. The court hated him for it, the Cabinet ministers patronised him, the press lampooned him as "the queen's stallion" in print so coarse that the Lord Chamberlain pulled it. The Queen of England wrote, in her journal of the day his obituary went to the papers, that her trust in him had been complete; that no one had ever done more for her than he had; and that in any society or any country he would have been counted a man.

Read the story →

On the night of Sunday the sixteenth of October 1859, John Brown, fifty-nine years old, the Connecticut-born, Ohio-raised abolitionist of the Scots-Irish Brown family of New England (descended on the male side from a Cromwellian-Scots Brown emigrant of the 1660s to Connecticut), led a raiding party of twenty-one men (sixteen white, five Black) down from a rented farmhouse at Kennedy Farm on the Maryland-Virginia border into the federal armoury at Harpers Ferry in western Virginia, on the confluence of the Potomac and the Shenandoah rivers. The plan was to seize the armoury arsenal (the US Army's principal weapons depot in the Upper South, containing about a hundred thousand muskets and rifles), to distribute the arms to the local enslaved Black population of the surrounding plantations of Loudoun and Jefferson counties, and to provoke a general slave rebellion that would, on Brown's theological reading, sweep south through the Appalachian Mountains and end the institution of slavery in the United States. The raid was militarily a failure within thirty-six hours: the Virginia and Maryland militia gathered through the afternoon of the seventeenth and surrounded the armoury engine-house in which Brown and the surviving raiders were holding hostages; the federal force under Colonel Robert E. Lee of the US Army (the future Confederate commander, then a serving US Army officer) arrived overnight and took the engine-house at dawn on the eighteenth with a twelve-marine assault under Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart. Ten of Brown's party were killed; Brown himself was wounded but taken alive. The political consequence of the raid was, by every careful judgment of US Civil War historiography, the trigger of the eighteen-month sequence of political events (the 1860 election of Lincoln on a free-soil platform; the December 1860 secession of South Carolina; the formation of the Confederacy in the February 1861 Montgomery convention) that produced the American Civil War of April 1861. Brown was tried at Charles Town, Virginia, on the twenty-fifth of October 1859 for treason, murder and conspiracy to incite insurrection. He was convicted on the second of November and hanged at Charles Town on the second of December 1859.

Read the story →